Two Schools: Newtown and Toulouse

In France, where I was visiting my family for an early-winter break with my four-year-old daughter, the reaction to the Newtown school shooting was one of horror and of bewilderment—“Incomprehensible,” “unbelievable,” “unthinkable,” or, more often, dingue (crazy). Disbelief altered the faces of Parisians usually known for their urban cool. In spite of the biting cold and urgent plans for Christmas shopping, they could be seen, haggard, reading the headlines in the green kiosks of the street newsstands over and over again, or staring at the news channel in cafés that normally cater to soccer fans. When they learned that I’ve lived in California for close to ten years, they’d ask me, “Why? Why?” Not why anyone would walk into an elementary school to massacre children, but how come a mother of two in a well-to-do New England community could quietly collect up to five weapons, among them a .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic assault rifle, a Glock, and Sig Sauer pistol (“the weapon of choice for élite units around the world” according to its maker’s online catalogue), legally, and without raising red flags. The answer, that the American Constitution appears to guarantee a right to bear arms and that no politician is ready to take on the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun lobbies, was met by an uneasy silence. And then this, whispered, looking away: “How can you put your daughter in a preschool in San Francisco and sleep at night?”

French schools are not immune from deadly madness. For a long time, parents in small villages or urban metropolises could drop off their kids in the morning knowing that schools were not only free but also safe. That changed last March, when Mohamed Merah, a self-proclaimed jihadist on an American no-fly list, erupted at the Ozar Hatora Jewish School in Toulouse at 8 A.M., a camera affixed to his belt, and started to fire indiscriminately at the playground with an automatic pistol. He first shot Jonathan Sandler, a rabbi and a teacher at the school, and his two sons, aged three and six, who were hiding behind him. The eight-year-old Miriam, the daughter of the principal of the school, ran to escape; Merah grabbed her by the hair, put a gun to her temple, pulled the trigger once, twice: nothing. Realizing that his 9-millimetre gun had jammed, he switched to a .45-calibre weapon and shot her point-blank in the head.

Later, the police found an impressive arsenal of illegally obtained weapons, worth twenty thousand euros, in his cache: two Uzis, a Sten gun, a Python revolver, three Colt .45s along with a stash of ammunition—an “arsenal” that would have to be purchased on the black market, commented criminologist Jérôme Pierrat in L’Express a few days later.

Merah was a terrorist in the legal sense of the term: he used guns as political weapons to make an ideological point (he said that he was avenging Palestinian children by attacking a Jewish school). Adam Lanza, too, spread terror, though the meaning of his action will remain forever sealed. Does it help to know why and whom to fear? One can track illegal networks and traffics, not scan the minds of every single citizen. Even amateur terrorists like Merah, who seems to have acted alone, leave a trail of suspicious contacts, communications, propaganda leaflets, and itineraries. Killers like Adam Lanza or the Aurora-theatre shooter are typically antisocial and reclusive, and don’t arouse suspicion. They are an invisible menace. And yet, there have been dozens of Adam Lanzas in the recent history of the United States, and there’s been only one Mohamed Merah in France as long as one can remember.

Lest pro-gun advocates exploit the Toulouse shooting as proof that the best-regulated countries cannot prevent tragedies, a few other distinctions are necessary. Adam Lanza did not have to travel to Pakistan and Afghanistan to train and learn how to kill; he did not have to buy secondhand weapons on the black market with money stolen in petty crimes and low-profile burglaries; he did not have to lie to intelligence services when asked about his frequent travels to the Middle East. Instead, he opened a door in the warmth of his own home, picked out four guns, and proceeded to kill his mother and twenty-six others.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the French noted in disbelief the absence of political response from the Obama Administration and the country at large. It is a measure of how far on the fringe pro-gun arguments are in France that one of the only political figures to deny any causality between gun possession and the likelihood of mass shootings was the extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Since then, there’s been a glimmer of hope, if Senator Feinstein, backed by a White House task force led by Joe Biden, can push for a ban on assault weapons and get it passed. But from the perspective of a country like France, where semi-automatic weapons and handguns are strictly prohibited except for a few narrow exceptions, and where, incidentally, less than ten per cent of all homicides are by firearm (compared to sixty per cent in the United States), this measure looks like a drop in the ocean. In 2009, the last year for which figures are available, the over-all homicide rate in France was 1.1 per hundred thousand (and 0.1 per hundred thousand for homicide by firearms), as opposed to five homicides per hundred thousand people in the United States. In the U.S., homicide by firearm was the second leading cause of death for the ten-to-twenty-four age group in 2006, and the fourth leading cause of death for children between ages five to nine, according to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control Office of Statistics and Programming.

Sylvie Kauffmann, the editorial director for Le Monde and their correspondent in Washington, D.C., and New York from 1993 to 2001, pointed out an underlying paradox here: “That a country so attached to its civil liberties is able to come together and accept significant restrictions to its individual rights to fight against terrorism in the wake of September 11th but is unable to limit the availability of firearms that kill their own children, that’s properly impossible to understand for Europeans.”

The French are hardly the only ones to be bewildered, as Evan Osnos reported from China. The United States’ cultural insularity is vividly captured by a simple fact: only two countries in the world consider gun possession a citizen’s basic right rather than a privilege. The other is Yemen. Even in this select class of two, there are an estimated eighty-eight guns for every hundred people in the United States, compared to fifty-five per person in Yemen, according to the Small Arms Survey. Between three and seven million illegal weapons are in circulation in France, according to police sources, or between five and ten for every hundred—a figure that shocked the French when it was released in the wake of the Toulouse shooting, but which pales in comparison to the more than two hundred seventy million firearms legally owned by American civilians. The United States has the glorious record of counting almost as many guns as people.

Seen from abroad, there’s a new American geography, one of places strung together by a narrative of terror. Littleton, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Oak Creek, Newtown: the names ring like a litany of preventable massacres—blots of blood on the map of a country more and more foreign to others in the depth and absurdity of its tragedy.